Nissan unveils 'self-healing' iPhone case
Magic auto paint vanquishes scratched shiny-shiny
Japanese automaker Nissan's European arm is migrating the company's "pioneering self-healing paint" to the world of pocketable shiny-shiny, introducing an iPhone case that removes its own scratches with nary a buff nor a polish.
"The Scratch Shield iPhone case is a great example of us taking a Nissan automotive technology that has had a huge impact for our customers, and then shifting the boundaries to apply it to another everyday product," said European bizdev honcho Bob Laishley in a statement announcing this world-changing development.
The Scratch Shield paint, used now on the Nissan Murano, 370Z, X-Trail, and Infiniti, employs a gel-like polyrotaxane coating on an ABS-plastic case. The coating – in addition to being more grippable than slippery paint, has the ability to grow back into a scratch, thus "healing" the blemish.

The Scratch Shield iPhone case protects not only your precious iPhone 4 or 4S, but also itself
The healing process, Nissan says, can take as little as an hour for small scratches, although what it calls "more severe cases" can take up to a week to mend – not unlike human skin.
The European Scratch Shield iPhone case is merely a prototype designed to gauge interest, but Nissan is also working with Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo to add the self-healing tech to that company's Style Series N-03B handsets.
Thanks to the combined work of Nissan, the University of Tokyo, and the Japanese company Advanced Softmaterials, one of the banes of modern living – embarrassingly scuffed smartphone cases – has been vanquished.
Ain't materials science wunnerful? ®
COMMENTS
Don't leave them around...
...in places where they will get nicked?
Also available in black...
Its not self-healing at all. They just crammed on so many gaudy logo's that no-one will notice the scratches.
Indeed
It's not like the materials don't exist. I had a little iRiver about 8 years ago that spent a year bouncing around in my pocket with all my lose change. After the battery gave out (which I'm sure has nothing to do with the case material) it spent the next 6 years or so in a variety of junk boxes. When I finally threw it away, there was nary a scratch on the case or screen. Shame the same couldn't be said for any iDevice.
Why do we have to buy scratch-free covers for our devices when they could be manufactured to a better quality? (Rhetorical).
I can see it now
It's from Nissan. So it will be very well made, have good performance, be very reliable, and I just don't WANT one.
